


what’s it gonna be?

by enbyguity (mugen)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, F/F, Fantasy, Magic, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Monster/Human Relationship, Monsters, POV Third Person Limited, Reunions, Supernatural Elements, Thunderstorms, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 07:40:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16214516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mugen/pseuds/enbyguity
Summary: Girl meets girl. Except one of them is a witch, the other is a monster, and they’ve already met a long time ago.





	what’s it gonna be?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crescenttwins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crescenttwins/gifts).



> Hi crescenttwins! Originally we got matched with one of the anime fandoms but when I read your dear creator letter and saw that your favorite part of femslashex is the origfics and that you requested one of the ships I was contemplating offering, I just knew I had to choose that!! It's a little short, but I hope you’ll enjoy this! ♥

If this was a movie it would start like this: a young woman is sitting on the train, alone, resting her head against the window—not recommended in real life—a dog-eared book on her lap with a colorful bookmark peeking out, with the sound of the gentle rain playing in the background. But this was not a movie, and Mariana had always had bad luck with anything public transport related, which is why she’d found herself on a crowded bus, crammed between a mage snoring so loudly it was giving her a headache and a huge pile of suitcases belonging to the mountain troll family a row behind her. The smallest suitcase on the top could tip over any minute and Mariana didn’t fancy getting a concussion over some shoddy spellwork. But until the suitcase actually fell she couldn’t do anything about it, the magical sensor strapped to her wrist would have gone off if she attempted a spell.

Getting arrested and suspended from the Academy on the first week of her second year was technically not her fault. She had no hand in the repeated necromancy attempts her brand new roommate had going, nor was Mariana at blame for her own magic reacting to it badly and amplifying it. Stealing the poor cat caught in the middle of all of that, on the other hand? That was entirely Mariana’s fault. She wasn’t expecting coming off scot-free, but restricting her magic was a bit of an overkill. She was now richer with a three months long suspension, an annoying gadget she couldn’t take off, and a zombie cat softly purring in the bag in her lap.

She still had three stops to go when the troll family got off the bus—the littlest one almost stumbled over Mariana, but everyone survived the encounter without any injuries. Since the commotion woke up her mage neighbor, Mariana had to deal with his passive-aggressive glaring at the small device on her left wrist for thirty more minutes. The little old lady who sat down on her other side didn’t strike up a conversation with her, just told Mariana to look after her cat, the cat she not only smuggled out of campus but also illegally brought it with her on the bus. In Mariana’s defense the cat was technically not alive anymore so it couldn’t count as “live cargo”, and there were no rules against undead animals.

Mariana would have been genuinely surprised if it wasn’t pouring when the bus arrived to her stop. Her luck had apparently run out when she didn’t get caught carrying an animal, however dead or undead it was.  She didn’t even bother with digging out her umbrella that was at the bottom of her suitcase. She would only have to hold on until she got home: once the device registered the address she’d given the authorities, some of the magical bans would get lifted. She should be at home ten minutes tops.

“Home” was kind of an overstatement, not quite untrue but the house she was heading to was not the one she was living in in the past six years. After living in the suburbs for such a long time, then spending a year in a large college town, she wasn’t looking forward to moving back to the middle of nowhere with only a small town in a twenty mile radius.

Dragging a huge suitcase, even one that came with a built-in weight lightening charm, through an entire forest was somewhat of a feat and Mariana was out of shape by any and all standards. She was drenched by the time she found the little stone path that led to the house.

The house Mariana grew up in was cozy, but still big enough for a family of three. Back then her parents were still together and her mother wasn’t always away at one conference or another—they were all happier now, with her mom deep in dimensional travel research and her dad chasing his lifelong dream of becoming a travel journalist, visiting magical tourist spots all over the world. As for Mariana, she got into her dream college and was studying something she loved: Interspecies Relations.

Mariana didn’t have a key but she didn’t need one: the ward protecting the house was attuned to all family members’ auras. The rain started to ease up the second she turned the doorknob, because what else would have happened, given Mariana’s luck. She flicked on the lights—she knew her dad had stayed there a couple of months ago, everything should be in working order, the bills were paid—and collapsed on the bench in the hall, dripping rainwater everywhere. The magical sensor on her wrist bleeped once and its color changed from red to orange: it registered Mariana arriving to the address she’d given to the officers.

She peeked into her bag but the cat was somehow, miraculously, sleeping. She put the bag down next to her on the bench, careful not to wake the cat up—she needed to name it soon, “zombie cat” wasn’t really cutting it.

She stayed like that for a few minutes, slumped against the wall, thumbing through her Twitter feed on her phone, then with a loud groan she gathered herself and casted a drying spell. Mariana never liked using drying spells, they always made her shiver when the sudden coolness washed over her. She casted another drying spell, this time on her suitcase. She frowned at the mess that was the floor of the hall, but she could deal with that later. First, she should unpack.

She dropped the bag that had all her food on the kitchen table—takeout sounded heavenly though—and dragged her suitcase to the other side of the house. Her bedroom was exactly as she remembered: bright yellows and vibrant blues, with a large window, a desk, her king sized bed. Bookshelves covered two whole walls, but they stood empty, Mariana had all her books at her mom’s house.

The second she stepped into the room she knew something was wrong, there was an unmistakable presence of a nonhuman being there. She gathered her magic in her right hand—she was left handed but she figured it would be easier to cast with her free hand, rather than the one she had the magic restricting gadget on—and was ready to blast a lightning spell through her room before she spotted a dark shape under the bed. There was something familiar in it which made her hesitate. The lightning spell sizzled once in her palm then died out with a low whistling sound.

She didn’t have time to prepare another spell. The darkness under the bed moved: a tall shadowy body with a not quite solid form, claws as long as Mariana's forearms, tiny horns and a tail—a fully grown _crepusculum._

Dusk monsters were harmless and entirely family friendly, but they preferred lived-in houses where they could play with the children, not a country home that was only in use for a couple of weeks a year. Neither of her parents had told Mariana anything about a crepusculum or any household monsters she should have watched out for.

The monster blinked down at Mariana with huge yellow eyes.

“Mariana?”

The sound of her name triggered something in Mariana’s memories. She could see it as clear as a day: her five year old self, a week after she’d learned the word “penumbra” from one of her mom’s books, finding a young crepusculum under her bed and naming her “Penny”. But they both clearly grew up.

“Penny?” Mariana said tentatively.

The monster nodded a few times, enthusiastically, and curled her tail around the bedpost.

“Hi Mariana,” Penny said and smiled.

Mariana stared at the shadow monster slash childhood friend in front of her for a few beats. She could make things awkward or she could pretend nothing had changed, and it was a no-brainer she had to choose the latter.

“Dad never told me you still live here,” she said, and put her suitcase in the middle of the rug next to her bed. “Not that I mind! In fact, this is even better. Now you have a roommate. I’m staying here for three months.”

Penny didn’t move, but she visibly relaxed. Almost getting blasted with a lightning spell would give any monster—or human—a scare so Mariana didn’t blame her.

Before Mariana started to sort through her things, she hit her room with a thorough, long-range cleaning spell. _This sucks,_ she thought as she plopped down on her bed, exhausted. There was still a limit on her magic, but it wasn’t as restricting as it could have been.

It took Penny half an hour to scoot closer to Mariana, even though Mariana was talking to her the whole time. By the time Mariana unpacked all her clothes Penny was sitting next to her on the wooden floor, occasionally helping her out. Mariana coaxed her into eating dinner—dusk monsters didn’t eat human food or anything really, but dining in company was always better than eating alone.

 

 

They fell into a routine after a few days. Penny helped around the house, sometimes staying in the crooks and nooks of the house when there was too much sunlight coming from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the living room. Mariana got Penny to watch her favorite TV shows, huddled close with Mariana idly playing with Penny’s tail. That was something Mariana used to do as a kid, but the cuddling was new, and so was the warm, fluttery feeling in her chest whenever Penny said something Mariana found endearing. They talked and talked and talked, about their shared childhood, Mariana told her about the years they’d spent apart, about her college, about her classmates and classes. It was Penny’s suggestion to name the cat “Luna”—Luna stayed with them most of the time, but Mariana let her wander around the forest within a mile radius of the house. To Mariana’s surprise Penny and Luna got along swimmingly after a few minutes of mistrust on the cat’s part.

Mariana had dated both humans and nonhumans, _she wasn’t stupid,_ but her rapidly growing crush on her otherworldly roommate was quite inconvenient. In two months she was supposed to go back to the Academy and resume her studies.

She had put her class group chat on mute the second night she came home, and she only checked the group chat she had with a couple of friends who kept her updated on gossip and classwork. She was considering messaging her mother about the whatnots of relocating a dusk monster, but Mariana wasn’t sure she was ready to have that talk with her mother. By the time she would get back to the Academy she would spend only a month there before the semester break started anyway, she could do some research when she started school again.

On her fourth week of suspension their comfortable routine was shaken by a weather alert blasted on Mariana’s phone, her laptop, the TV that was turned off: a magical thunderstorm was coming. Magical storms affected every single magical human and nonhuman, and the effects were different than regular thunderstorms. Mariana knew she was only somewhat affected, the magical device on her wrist toned that down to an uncomfortable buzz under her skin. Before the storm could hit she fetched Luna from outside, who knew how an undead cat would be affected if caught in a magical storm, even if she was the most well behaved cat in existence (which she was) Luna could be in trouble.

When Mariana got back with Luna in her arms, Penny was nowhere to be found. Mariana called her name a few times before she found her in her bedroom, curled up under the bed.

Mariana quickly went through everything she knew about magical storms’ effects on dusk monsters, but none of them sounded pleasant: anxiety, uncontrollable shivering, cold-and-warm spells, restlessness, if severe, panic attacks. It took Mariana three minutes of sweet talking to get Penny out from under the bed, and two more minutes to get her to stay in the living room. Mariana closed all the curtains and casted a shadow warp spell on the living room—they shouldn’t be able to see any of the lightning strikes or hear the thunder, except for Mariana since she was the caster.

Ten minutes later they were curled up on the couch together, resuming their _Sailor Stars_ marathon. Mariana held her through the entire storm, even though Penny couldn’t see or hear anything from it, she still felt it. After a while, Penny fell asleep, tail wrapped around Mariana’s waist, head resting on her shoulder. Mariana stayed up till the storm died down, but soon enough Penny’s calm heartbeat lulled her to sleep.


End file.
